Steindl: 'Time to believe'

Tasmania JackJumpers championship captain Clint Steindl wants his team to take belief from a hard-fought loss to Perth, as they now head home to prepare to host the NBL's hottest team on Saturday.

Scoring was becoming a mighty tough thing for the JackJumpers in their championship defence in NBL25. That was all on show in last Sunday's 28-point loss to the Sydney Kings, where they managed a franchise-low 60 points.

That was on the back of scoring 77 two nights earlier against the South East Melbourne Phoenix, and over those two games Tasmania was shooting at 34 per cent from the field as a team and 19 per cent from three-point range, going 11/58.

Over the first 10 games of NBL25, the JackJumpers were putting up a league-low 76.6 points a game, with the next worst being the Cairns Taipans at 84.6.

But sometimes the best way to take that pressure off is to come out in the next game and just back yourselves in, get the shots up and see what happens.

That's exactly what the JackJumpers did in Perth on Thursday night and the result was they already had 51 points on the board by half-time, to be leading by four. In just two quarters, they'd nearly beaten their score from four days earlier.

In that first half, Tasmania made 13/22 from three-point land as a team and that included Milton Doyle and Jordon Crawford combining to go 8/13 for 26 points going into the break.

In total in the two games last weekend, the championship winning pair shot 1/25 from downtown and combined for 35 points, but they shot themselves out of those woes in a half on Thursday.

While the JackJumpers couldn’t quite maintain the pace in the second half, with 31 points in the last 20 minutes in the eventual six-point defeat, the signs were more encouraging. 

"Hopefully the guys take a lot of confidence out of it with their shooting," Steindl said.

"It's been a struggle at times for us and everyone knows it, but for the ball to go in tonight hopefully we can build on that.

"We've been defending fairly well and it did get away from us a touch there, but I hope they take a lot of confidence from their shooting and being able to put some scoreboard pressure on there."

The JackJumpers have still been defending well for the most part in NBL25, giving up just 84.1 points a game coming into Round 8, which was giving them a chance to win games despite their offensive struggles.

"Along the way we've been trying to find some little wins and we've been defending fairly well, and when we have we just haven’t been able to put the ball in the hole," Steindl said.

"You have to try and find these little wins and there'll be little patches you can try to take control of games, but the wins aren’t there right now.

"We're trying to find the small wins and soon enough if we do that, hopefully we get the results come our way. When that result comes, who knows and we just have to keep working without knowing when we can get that result we want."

While there were plenty of positives for Tasmania in Perth on Thursday, they have little time to reflect and have to immediately turn their attention to a clash against the top-of-the-table New Zealand Breakers.

"It's not much of a turnaround, so a lot of our review and prep for New Zealand is going to be done via video," Steindl said.

"We'll get stuck into that tomorrow on the trip home, but we've got a resilient group and a group that sticks together. We love being around each other and sometimes when you're going through these tough patches, that can be half the battle.

"There's numerous groups who would start to fracture, but that's definitely not us and we know how tough it is right now, but we'll embrace that as a group so there's no question in terms of us falling apart just because we're not getting the wins.

"We've got a group that's going to stick together this whole way and we're going to prepare as we always have."